


For the Scrapbook

by friendlyneighborhoodsecretary



Series: I'm Never Prompt with Prompts [18]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied IronDad, It's Loving May Parker Hours, May Parker (Spider-Man) Needs a Hug, May Parker and Tony Stark Can and Should Be Friends, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Queens loves Spider-Man, Set Very Soon After Peter's Unmasking, new york loves spider-man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23422174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary/pseuds/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary
Summary: Soon after Peter's post-Homecoming unmasking, May gets her first glimpse of Spider-Man on the job. And seeing a real live superhero moment takes on a whole new meaning when you know it's your kid under the mask.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: I'm Never Prompt with Prompts [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558726
Comments: 19
Kudos: 172





	For the Scrapbook

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt: Ansare - to hardly breathe, to be out of breath

Like most New Yorkers, May Parker has developed a certain level of numbness to the bizarre and unexpected. She’s shaken off her share of alien invasions and Iron Man sightings, of the street crime and near-miss accidents that come with living in a city so crammed to the gills with people. For the most part, she considers herself fairly unflappable.

And yet the first glimpse she gets of Peter—no, not Peter— _Spider-Man—_ swinging overhead knocks the air out of her lungs harder than a punch to the gut.

He’s little more than a flash of red and blue hurtling through the narrow slivers of sky between the buildings, but he’s unmistakable nonetheless. May knows the costume, the trademark pop and hiss of the weblines, the flashy mid-air somersaults and effortless acrobatics—she’s seen all of it plastered across newspaper spreads and played and replayed on the local news, but seeing it _now_ , in person, with the knowledge that _Peter_ is the one soaring thirty feet over her head…It takes her breath away.

There’s a crowd clustered in tight around the scene of the disaster a block and a half from the hospital May works out of, barely parting to admit the firetruck and ambulance that screech in from the opposite end of the street. It’s a minor sinkhole, if the chatter around the coffee stand May frequents during her lunches is accurate. Personally, May isn’t sure she would call a crater big enough to swallow two cars whole “minor,” but then she’s a nurse, not a geologist. Minor or not, it’s a gaping hole carved into the asphalt from the crumbling remains of the sidewalk on one side to the edge of the next lane on the other. And Spider-Man has just thrown himself over the rim.

May’s lungs stay clenched as she threads through the crowd to press against the freshly-erected barrier between the crowd and the sinkhole. Warring instincts simultaneously push her forward and pull her back. They’ve had the talk about secret identities and the separation between Peter and his persona, she and Peter and Stark…She can’t show any more interest than the rest of the ordinary civilians craning for a glimpse of the scene through the dust and debris. But it’s _Peter._ Her Peter, flinging himself head-first into exactly the kind of danger she’s always fretted at him to run from. Even if there wasn’t enough lingering grit to choke a horse lingering in the air, May wouldn’t have been able to breathe.

Seconds trickle into minutes before Spider-Man re-emerges, a woman clinging to his back and a little girl clasped against his chest. Both are shaky and disheveled when he passes them off the medics hovering at the sidelines, but they’re alive and in one piece and—thank heaven—so is Peter. May’s white-knuckle grip on the wooden barrier eases until he dives over the edge again. It happens thrice more in the time it takes for May to gulp down a few dozen more taunt, difficult breaths, once with another passenger in tow and twice to wrestle the two sunken cars back to the surface. The screech of rending metal and the groans of bending chassis are almost enough to send her leaping over the barrier (secret identities or not), but the nose of first one, then the other battered sedan comes rolling up and over the lip of the crater. Peter doesn’t seem any the worse for wear after either trip, aside from a little panting and the smudges of asphalt dust ground into arms of his suit. May, on the other hand, still feels vaguely like she’s going to faint into the sidewalk. Even after Peter is firmly back aboveground, with no vehicles that outweigh him by _several tons_ suspended in his arms, it’s a hard image to process.

A smattering of applause starts somewhere in the back of the crowd, and May soon finds herself swept up in the cheering that overtakes the gathering. She still doesn’t have enough air for the hoots and hollers and whistles, but—once she can wrench her death grip off the barrier—she claps shakily. It’s strange how fast the atmosphere has shifted since Spidey’s arrival, the tension ebbing away in favor of relieved celebration almost since the moment he swung into view—that was something May hadn’t picked up on in all those TV reports. It was unlike anything she’d seen before, even in connection with the rest of the superhumans that frequent the city. She’s experienced the giddy chatter that flows in the wake of Stark repulsors overhead, the vaguely patriotic cheers of a Captain America sighting, even the awed whispers that follow that particular sort of thunderbolt…But this is different. It’s less performative, May decides, as she watches a fireman clap Peter on the shoulder and a couple of the paramedics wave his direction as if greeting a coworker rather than a legend. Warmer, too, if the hug pressed upon him by the woman he pulled from the wreckage and the shy whisper from the teary little girl is any example.

May watches the scene unfold in front of her and is forced to admit—with some chagrin—that Stark was right. It had come up more than once during the hours they’d debated Peter’s right to stay in the mask. That his work meant something, not just to him, but to Queens. To New York. To the world, someday, if he stayed on the route he was on. At the time, May had thought that was just slick boardroom hyperbole. Maybe it still was. But the same instinct that twinges in May’s gut when her boy vaults back into the sinkhole pulses with the knowledge that he isn’t _just_ her boy anymore.

She watches him claw back up over the rim again, a scraggly teddy bear tucked under one arm, and lope over to the little girl once more. He crouches low and holds it out to her with both hands. The lenses on his mask crinkle as if he’s smiling underneath, and the girl smiles back as she lunges to grab both bear and Spider in a single enthusiastic hug.

May’s phone camera is pulled up and snapping almost before she realizes it. It’s a habit by now to grab a snapshot of Peter’s triumphs—AcaDec wins and school award, teenage milestones and months-long Lego builds. It’s a reflex by now to document her kid’s best moments. She glances down at the moment immortalized on the screen and decides she’s glad it is. This is a treasure. An encapsulation of what draws Peter out onto the frontlines. A sliver of time preserved, not just for Peter this time, but for May, too. Something in her chest unfurls as she studies the image of the happy ending amongst the chaos, and she finds she can breathe again almost as easily as she could before she caught her first sight of Queens’ patron hero. She’s not sure if she’ll ever be able to breathe easy _entirely_ while Peter is out in the mask…but it’s a start.

Spider-Man soars up to disappear among the rooftops, and the crowd begins to drift away to whatever responsibilities they’ve abandoned to watch the excitement. May saunters back towards the hospital’s staff entrance, her lunchbreak well-spent and her finger still hovering over her phone’s screen. It’s probably a silly idea; she and Stark don’t speak much apart from the logistics that must be discussed to make Peter’s internship work smoothly. Not that she can blame Stark for that, given that his ears are probably still stinging from that first post-unmasking reveal. Still. She does it anyway, firing off a quick text with the photo attached. It’s not exactly an admission that he was right (she _refuses_ to stoop to that), but…it’s an olive branch. And that’s enough for now.

> **MP: For your scrapbook. Or whatever the bougie billionaire equivalent is.**
> 
> **TS: My bougie billionaire scrapbook thanks you, Ms. Parker.**

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you for reading, my dears!!! <3 <3 <3


End file.
